Carly Fiorina’s Legacy as CEO of Hewlett Packard

As Carly Fiorina enjoys a surge in recent opinion polls in the race for the Republican presidential nomination, her record as former CEO of Hewlett Packard (HP) is being put under the microscope. Fiorina herself cites that record as part of the reason to elect her president — even though some have called her one of the worst CEOs of her era. It’s difficult to know what’s fact and what’s fiction — and what the most important takeaways are from her time as a senior business executive.

Long before Fiorina threw her hat in the ring of Republican presidential hopefuls, I spent time at HP conducting research for my book, Rapid Transformation. I interviewed more than 50 executives and mid-level managers who had worked for HP in the 2004-2007 timeframe, many of whom reported to Fiorina and subsequently worked with her successor, Mark Hurd. Here’s what I gleaned about Fiorina’s legacy at HP from that research.

When Fiorina came to HP, the culture that she walked into was very much “aim, aim, aim and fire” — a slow culture, during a time when companies were moving very fast. In that context, she was what we want our change leaders to be — bold and disruptive. One of her moves was to buy Compaq, which had a fast moving “Internet” culture — “aim, fire, fire, re-aim, fire.”

Although the early merger integration was successful, it ultimately missed key mid- and long-term goals under Fiorina. She was weak in execution and implementation, a problem that would dog her tenure at HP. One executive told me, “she wasn’t personally interested in leading implementation and relied on her senior team — and they missed the mark consistently.” Another said that during her first year on the job, she spent a disproportionate amount of time on the road, speaking out her vision, rather than following through on implementation.

And yet several executives who worked with her found her to be inspiring – “a rock star, and a dazzling performer on stage.” Fiorina attacked many different aspects of the company, including reorganization, cost cutting, and vision setting. As one executive told me, “She was everything HP wasn’t – charismatic, bold, even glamorous.”

But, that style, though attractive, isolated her from many of her senior leaders. It wasn’t the HP way. She was the disruptive leader she needed to be at the time, but she missed one key element. She never took the time to develop rapport with individual employees, and therefore never got buy-in or support for her initiatives.

HP culture at that time was very engineer-dominated, and relatively male-dominated. As HP’s first female CEO, Fiorina just didn’t connect well with the engineers. Many of the mid-level managers and executives I interviewed reported that she pushed them to deliver on metrics that were not grounded in reality or data and were not really achievable. Many also felt that she needed to check her ego. I walked through the halls of HP headquarters during her tenure, and saw that she’d hung a huge portrait of herself next to HP founders Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard. People found that to be very tacky.

When Mark Hurd took over as CEO in 2005, he took that picture down, and noticeably didn’t put his own up on the wall. He was a humble, low-key guy who was very numbers-driven, focusing on data and execution, building credibility and re-establishing rapport with employees – a stark contrast to Fiorina’s style as CEO.

But Hurd never mentioned the word “strategy,” according to the HP executives I interviewed – not in a single memo during his tenure as CEO. He was basically implementing the strategy that Fiorina had put in place – and Fiorina had been a brilliant strategist, putting the company on a footing to compete with the likes of IBM and Sun Microsystems. One executive told me, “Carly was looking so far ahead, you couldn’t keep up with her.” During Fiorina’s tenure, HP stock dropped 65%, while during the same period the S&P 500 dropped 15%. During Mark Hurd’s tenure, HP stock doubled, while during the same period S&P 500 dropped by 8%.

Despite her charisma and strategic acumen, I believe Fiorina ultimately failed in several ways. She wasn’t able to keep her ego in check or to connect with people at lower levels within the organization. But most importantly, she failed in the fact that she didn’t bring someone like Mark Hurd on board earlier. Great leaders recognize their own weaknesses. Had she been more self-aware of her own shortcomings, she could have brought in a second-in-command, a COO, to enable her to focus on what she did best – strategy and vision. The important question for voters is: Has she learned from the mistakes she made at HP? Has she realized what her own shortcomings are? Since she never took on a comparable CEO job after HP, conjecture is difficult.

One important note: blaming Fiorina for HP’s current problems now is a huge stretch. The board didn’t manage Fiorina well — her compensation was not tied to performance, for instance. Between 2005 and 2011, there were three CEOs who were fired (including Fiorina and Hurd) before Meg Whitman became CEO in 2011. This kind of musical chairs is a clear sign of a dysfunctional board.

The bottom line is that Carly Fiorina is not as good as she says she is, but she’s not as bad as her critics say. In politics, you’re either good or you’re terrible. But in business, the picture is often more nuanced.

Behnam Tabrizi has been teaching transformational leadership at Stanford University’s Department of Management Science and Engineering and executive programs for more than 20 years. A leading expert on organizational and leadership transformation, he is managing director of Rapid Transformation, LLC. Behnam has written five books including Rapid Transformation (HBR Press, 2007) for companies and The Inside-Out Effect (Evolve Publishing, 2013) for leaders. Follow him on Twitter at @TabriziBehnam.